All that is Solid … is a radical blog that seeks to promote a future beyond capital's social universe. "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848).

Edited by Bertell Ollman, New York University, USA and Kevin B. Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Series: The International Library of Essays in Classical Sociology

Marx’s approach to analyzing society and especially his critique of capitalist society, continues to influence the work of a large number of scholars world-wide. Unfortunately, there are relatively few clear accounts of what this approach is and how to put it to use. And, despite the many attempts to use Marx’s method to study a variety of subjects, there are relatively few that can serve as useful models. In the present volume, the internationally renowned Marxist scholar, Bertell Ollman, and the social theorist Kevin B. Anderson, have brought together a sampling of the best writings of the past hundred years that illustrate and critique Marx’s method as well as explain what it is and how to put it to work. Anyone wishing to understand better Marx’s dialectical method (along, of course, with the theories created with its help), or to revise this method or to criticize it, or to use it in their own work will find this collection invaluable.

Contents:

Introduction

Part I Theory and Method: Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat, Georg Lukács; The age of revolutions: industrial, social-political, intellectual, Raya Dunayevskaya; Putting dialectics to work: the process of abstraction in Marx’s method, Bertell Ollman; The unity of science and revolution: Marxism as critique, Peter G. Stillman; Karl Marx’s Enquête Ouvriere, Hilde Weiss (and Karl Marx).

Part II Political Economy: From financial crisis to world slump: accumulation, financialization and the global slowdown, David McNally; Self-sourcing: how corporations get us to work without pay!, Martha E. Gimenez; The reproduction of daily life, Fredy Perlman; The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein; The ‘new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession, David Harvey.

Part III State and Politics: The constitution as an elitist document, Michael Parenti; The monopolistic economy: property and contract, Franz Neumann; The worldwide class struggle, Vincent Navarro; The economic and social functions of the legal institutions, Karl Renner; The problem of the capitalist state, Nicos Poulantzas; Reply to Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband; The Marxist case for revolution today, Ernest Mandel.

Part IV The Individual and Society: Psychoanalysis and sociology, Erich Fromm; The uses and abuses of ‘civil society’, Ellen Meiksins Wood; Labor market and penal sanction: thoughts on the sociology of penal justice, Georg Rusche; The injuries of class, Michael D. Yates; Sports and cultural politics: the attraction of modern spectator sports, Sut Jhally and Bill Livant.

Part VI History: Exploitation, E.P. Thompson; The feudal mode of production, Perry Anderson; The decline and fall of Rome, G.E.M. de Ste Croix.

Part VII Colonialism, Race and Gender: Negroes in the Civil War: their role in the second American revolution, C.L.R. James (J.R. Johnson); Race relations – its meaning, beginning and progress, Oliver C. Cox; The feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism, Nancy C.M. Hartsock; Marx’s late writings on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies and gender, Kevin B. Anderson.

Bertell Ollman is Professor of Politics at New YorkUniversity. He has published widely on Marxist theory and his books include Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971, 1976), Marxism: An Uncommon Introduction (1991), Dialectical Investigations (1993) The Dance of the Dialectic: Further Essays on Marx’s Method (2001) and (as editor, with Edward Vernoff) The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses 3 vols (1982, 1984, 1986). His books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese and Korean. In 2001 he was the recipient of the first Charles McCoy Life Achievement Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association.

Kevin B. Anderson is Professor of Sociology, Political Science and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (1995); Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (2005), and the co-author, with Janet Afary, of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. He is the editor of Marx on Suicide (1999, co-edited with Eric A. Plaut); The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx by Raya Dunayevskaya (2002, co-edited with Peter Hudis); and The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004, co-edited with Peter Hudis). His third monograph, single-authored, is Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago, 2010) for which he received the 2011 Paul Sweezy Book Award from the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association. He has published numerous articles on Marx and Marxism for over 25 years.